Sunday, January 11, 2015

Tagging the Lambs

Royal White Sheep all look the same at first glance. Now that we've had the sheep for a while I can tell all the ewes apart without looking at their tags, but I am sure that once all the lambs are born and growing they will be quite hard to tell apart. So for that reason, and others, we are tagging all our sheep. The ewes came with numbers. Three have tags in their left ear and one has it on the right ear. I like the idea of having ewes tagged on one ear and rams tagged on the other side. Premier 1 has a great page on different numbering systems and other tagging FAQs. Since we won't be having a lot of sheep I am keeping it simple with just a chronological order and I decided to go with ewes having the tag in the right ear and rams in the left ear (that seems to be the common placement among people on line.)
Meet 0001 (AKA Big Boy):

And 0002 (AKA Little Boy):

They didn't make a sound when the tags were placed. A little grain for a treat afterward and they were happily jumping around as usual.

2 comments:

That's exactly how we do it, tags in the one ear for ewes and the opposite for boys. Makes it easy to tell them apart on the fly (literally, as they are flying past you...) Congrats on your lambing so far!